1984 Rebellion Quotes

How we cite our quotes: (Book.Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote #13

But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act. (2.2.63)

Quote #14

She hated the Party, and said so in the crudest words, but she made no general criticism of it. Except where it touched upon her own life she had no interest in Party doctrine […]. Any kind of organized revolt against the Party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid. The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same. He wondered vaguely how many others like her there might be in the younger generation people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog. (2.3.15)

Winston is critical of Julia’s view of sex as limited to a form of private rebellion against the Party.

Quote #15

She knew the whole driveling song by heart, it seemed. Her voice floated upward with the sweet summer air, very tuneful, charged with a sort of happy melancholy […]. It struck him as a curious fact that he had never heard a member of the Party singing alone and spontaneously. It would even have seemed slightly unorthodox, a dangerous eccentricity, like talking to oneself […].

"You can turn round now," said Julia.

He turned round, and for a second almost failed to recognize her […]. The transformation that had happened was much more surprising than that. She had painted her face. (2.4.29-31)

Julia delights in engaging in small-scale, private rebellions against the Party, such as engaging in sex and wearing makeup.